ERRORS IN OMITTING RADIAL CONVECTION IN POLYMER MELT FLOW SIMULATIONS

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Abstract
In the past the numerical simulation of polymer melt flows in channels has usually been carried out by neglecting the radial velocity component in both the momentum and energy equations. Attempts to include it showed temperature oscillations becoming more severe for convection-dominated flows. New results based on a finite-element streamline-upwind/Petrov-Galerkin method to treat the convective and viscous dissipation terms show that in nonisothermal studies of polymer melt flows, the temperature gradients due to the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity create radial velocity components that cannot be ignored even in cases of straight channels. The errors in omitting radial convection from the calculations are examined by comparison with available results in the literature based on such simplifications for the wire-coating process.